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Owner of PageF30.com.
Translator of Demian by Hermann Hesse into English - an interlinear translation for German students and those who want to see the original text.
http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/mithradates
Fluent in Japanese, Korean. Proficient in Mandarin, Turkish, German, French, Portuguese, others.

Saturday, September 05, 2009

"Why are we going back to the Moon? We've already been there." The Moon is big, and the numbers alone don't do it justice. 10921 km circumference...so what does that mean when compared to the Earth? Well, it has a surface area the size of Africa plus Australia. Okay, but that's still a bit hard to imagine for most, so I've made up a pair of images showing how some cities in Europe and North America would match up when compared with the Moon. Keep in mind that this is using a very rough scale; its only purpose is to give some idea of just how huge this body is that we really haven't even begun to explore. First, here's a nice image of the Moon. Now, let's take some major cities in North America and put them on this image. On the side facing us alone it easily encompasses the region from southern Canada to the entire United States, and even down into Mexico.

How about Europe? We'll put Tórshavn (that's the capital of the Faroe Islands) up in the northwest part of the map, which makes Switzerland roughly the centre. Moscow is there at the far east, and you can reach as far south as Cairo with ease.

So next time someone is wrong on the internet and tells you that there's no reason to go back to the Moon because we've already explored it, send them this map and watch them realize that they're wrong.

Two other posts related to this subject: here's one on the false idea that we're "going back" to the Moon, and here's another on visualizing the surface area of planets and asteroids.